


there’s a road that follows to her home

by canariesrise



Category: Stargate Atlantis, Stargate SG-1
Genre: Angst, Established Relationship, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:55:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,725
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24396124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canariesrise/pseuds/canariesrise
Summary: Sam adjusts to the reality of life after Atlantis, and finds an Earthbound escape with Jack.
Relationships: Samantha "Sam" Carter/Jack O'Neill
Comments: 22
Kudos: 94





	there’s a road that follows to her home

After the extraction ceremony — which did much less than Sam had hoped to distract her from her current circumstances — after meetings and paperwork, and after a boisterous dinner with the team, they return to her house, crossing the threshold to where they are just Jack and Sam.

There’s a settling of bags, stirring the eerily stagnant air of the long unoccupied space, and then they’re standing there, eyes locked in a silent conversation about love and distance and fear. They don’t touch immediately — perhaps a reflex from the years where touching couldn’t happen — but after a moment, Sam closes the distance between them in a few purposeful strides. Her kiss is fueled by the need that has been achingly pent up inside of her over the past few months. For a few moments, they just kiss — his lips meeting hers fervently and his hands cupping her face in that way that makes her question the universality of forces like gravity.And then he pulls her closer, touching her as if to memorize each inch of her — as if he could have possibly forgotten any of her — tender and possessive in his knowledge that she is _here._

She sighs into his mouth, countering his pull with her own, leading him back through the familiar paths of her house, pulling him on top of her, pulling them into this space of their own.

_______________________________

It’s nearly midnight when they’ve showered and returned to her bed. Sam’s carried two mugs of decaf coffee in from her kitchen and hands one to Jack before climbing between the covers and wrapping her hands around her own mug, savoring its familiar warmth. (Daniel had handed her a couple of bags of coffee before they parted earlier that evening, citing the fact that there wouldn’t be anything fresh at her house. And of course, knowing her tendency to seek the comfort of ritual and disregard her own sleep hygiene, he’d been sure to include some decaf among the mix.)

Jack takes a sip, and then stares into the mug for long enough that Sam knows he’s trying to work his way around to saying something.

He takes a deep breath. “I have to go to Geneva. Tomorrow night. I couldn’t get out of it…”

“It’s okay.” She cuts him off. By the time her removal had been finalized, it would have been too late to make other arrangements. And she wasn’t expecting him to be in Colorado Springs for long anyway — that wasn’t the nature of things, at least not right now.

“Come with me.”

It’s an invitation of purely personal nature, an affirmation of love in him asking about the sort of indulgence that he was often reticent to even verbalize. She wouldn’t have needed convincing, had no desire to sit around Colorado Springs without a posting or a plan. But the longing in his question — that need for her that still fills her with a low current of something that manages to feel both like awe and the recognition of what is so obviously right — makes her answer as easy as her next breath.

“Yes.”

_______________________________

They decide to take advantage of the Geneva trip — one of the multi-national diplomatic obligations that come with Jack’s global-scale role — to use a bit of their over-accrued leave and explore a few of Switzerland’s cities and towns. And so by 1800 the next day, she’s packed a collection of autumn-appropriate civilian clothes that stood long untouched in her closet and drawers and is seated next to Jack on a Europe-bound flight.

They’ve been talking for an hour or so here and there, about European cakes, and the small but very loud dog that now lives down the hall from Jack in D.C., and which extraterrestrial culture the Swiss Guard’s uniforms most remind them off, and eventually back to cakes and other non-cake pastries that Jack decides are permissible if Sam really wants some. Sam keeps thinking of stories of her team that she wants to tell him, but she can’t bring herself to say anything now. Sensing some gulf of emotion lingering just beyond those memories, she studiously avoids them.

The plane has been flying toward a setting sun, and as darkness envelopes them, Sam reminds Jack that he will be in meetings tomorrow and should really try to sleep.

He responds with a look that somehow manages to be both boyishly stubborn and caring at the same time, but she curtails that effort with a simple, “Sleep, Jack.”

There’s an angle to her head, her tone both stronger and softer, that makes him realize how leadership has rubbed off on her. He leans into his airplane’s excuse for a “pillow” with a smirk of amusement but decides now is not the moment to comment on that, simply replying “Yes, ma’am.”

Sam leans back into her own seat, and tries to focus on the flight — the path they’re likely to take over the Atlantic and western Europe, the adjustments the pilot will make at each stage — but it’s not enough to really occupy her mind. Her thoughts race ahead of her, a kaleidoscope of faces — the people who are no longer her people — a low churning of anxiety over Atlantis’ precarious existence, and below it all a sadness that she can’t fully wrap her mind around yet, of being unceremoniously removed from a place where she had built a home.

Beside her, Jack is snoring quietly, putting his career military skill of sleeping anywhere to good use. Sam feels the weight of her almost preposterous situation — returning from Atlantis and then traveling across nine time zones — on her eyelids, but she doesn’t manage to rest uninterrupted for more than an hour, the noises and motions around her still too close to her consciousness.

She was never as much of a good soldier as people seemed to think.

_______________________________

When Sam wakes in their hotel room the next day, the surroundings relatively luxe but still nondescript in a mildly disorienting way, she’s a bit alarmed to see the crack of sunlight coming through the curtains is bright enough to suggest it’s already midday. Jetlag or gatelag or not, she wouldn’t normally allow herself to sleep quite so late, wanting to adjust as soon as possible and not feel like she’s wasting her day.

Jack is long gone to his meetings; he’s left her note to that effect with a few other details on the ornate desk. She finds it while she’s poking around sleepily, looking for the coffee machine.

On SG1, she had been a body in motion, racing through a seemingly endless obstacle course of planets, motherships, gates, staff weapons, all on a ticking clock. Atlantis — command — had been stillness, but electrified. A constant charge running through her veins, even as she sat her desk, of needing, wanting, to always be strategic, kind, tactical, fair, and five other things at once. Of leading from behind the lines, never truly leaving the field even while she stayed within the glass walls.

Now that the charge is gone, the exhaustion catches up to her.

Once she’s showered and dressed she leaves the hotel on a search for food, what she supposes should be considered lunch. She can’t even fully register the almost surreal level of beauty around her, the way that European cities always seem to be, but her glance does pause a few times on some newer constructions — their sleek lines of steel and glass reaching for the sky, the sun glinting off of them filling her with a low ebb of longing for what was so recently hers.

She ends up back in their hotel room, an overly ornate sandwich and absurdly expensive juice in hand. After lunch, she spends the rest of the afternoon alternating between a half dozen scientific journal articles she’s been saving to read later, not really focusing on any of them for long, and scrolling aimlessly through her email. 

She finds a message from John, which is more about her removal itself than any operational concerns around the change of command. It contains more expletives that are really appropriate for an Air Force email account and a rambling style that she attributes, with a small smile of amusement, to the pain meds. There’s another from McKay, which is is sweet in its own self-involved way.

Jack returns in the early evening, the sight of him in his blues unfailingly prompting her smile. He meets her eyes, an almost smirk playing on his lips. They exchange greetings and now he transition into a few familiar handwaving complaints about the international scourge of bureaucracy. He begins to change, hanging his jacket with care in the closet near the door, and she stands and walks over to him. She puts her hands on his chest and he stills, resting his on her hips as she moves to loosen the knot in his tie.

She pauses halfway through her ministrations, and he meets her eyes in a gentle question. 

“I missed you.” A smile pulls at the corner of his mouth, and she can tell he’s holding back a cocky joke about her missing him after only a handful of hours. But he holds his tongue for the moment. She can see, too, his concern for how she’s doing, but he doesn’t press.

She can’t tell him all of it. That standing at the head of Atlantis had often felt like standing on an impossibly thin line between billions of humans and a relentless, oncoming tide of Wraith. That she missed his voice behind her, steadying her. That just when she was really hitting her stride in that weird, beautiful place with her strange and wonderful team, it was taken away from her. (And that, even though intellectually she knows it was all politics, it still feels like someone passing judgment on her command.)

He moves a hand up to the nape of her neck, cradling her head gently, still holding her gaze. There’s a shadow that’s developed behind the blue in the years that he’s known her, but her eyes are as open to him as ever. She’s looking at him now with love and need and a tinge of uncertainty, a look he was more familiar with in years past. He kisses her then, more than willing to lend that certainty to her, pulling her closer to him to find his own certainty in the feel of her chest pushing against his each breath.

She breaks the kiss and rests her head for against his chest. They stay like that for a long moment until he asks, “Dinner?”

Over dinner, they catch up on the unofficial news she missed while she was away — namely all the nonsense that Cam and Daniel had somehow managed to get themselves into in only a year, with Vala saving their asses more than either was likely to admit. It’s a delightful change of pace, and she’s almost gleeful to have the fodder for the next time she sees them, but even as the conversation stays in the Milky Way, she can’t seem to keep her mind fully there.

_______________________________

The clock on the nightstand pronounces 2:16 in a haunted green glow and the room is still.

It had been raining lightly when they left dinner that evening, and over the hours it had progressed into a heavy downpour, thunder echoing in its wake.

Lightning strikes a nearby tree and a hollow crack erupts, the sound startling Jack into immediate alertness. His abrupt movement is what wakes Sam.

He feels her shifting, her gaze trying to find his as he’s sitting up. His eyes stay straight ahead, searching. “It’s just…” he starts, then abandons the thought, lying back down next to her.

Her eyes are still searching and he can see her working to determine how not alright he is and thinking through what she misses by not sleeping at his side every night. He wonders what sort of noises disrupted her rest in Atlantis. That place could be damned creepy when it tried.

“I’m sorry.” She murmurs, about three things at once.

“Don’t be.”

She pulls herself closer, placing a hand over his heart and insinuating one of her legs between his. Her lips are just inches from his neck so he feels as much as hers when she speaks again, “I want to know these things.”

The love in her voice fills him with a warm ache, his chest relaxing fully from the clenched state of alertness it was in moments ago.

“Sam.” She’s feathering his jaw, his neck with kisses and he wraps his arms possessively around her. Her lips move down his neck to suck on the spot that always makes him groan. With a hand on the back of her neck, fingers winding into her hair, he pulls her up and kisses her deeply, igniting in her that same magnetic energy, pulling her under the current with him.

She surfaces and he meets her gaze, with trust and want and a certain playful hint of ‘Carter, stop holding yourself to ridiculous standards’ all wrapped up in that one look. She surges against him again, finding his lips in an open-mouthed kiss, her hands seeking the warmth under his worn USAF t-shirt.

She’s wearing some sort of loose soft cotton tank top, and he appreciates the ease of access, sliding his hand up her side. She sighs into the kiss as he palms and then massages her breast. He will never tire of how she leans into his touch, relaxing into him and pushing him in equal measure. He slides a hand between them, runs a teasingly light touch up the inside of her thigh, stopping before his hand reaches her center, smiling as she presses down to meet his hand, her breath catching as he brushes a knuckle against her through her underwear. She moves her hand down to where he’s hard and straining against his boxers; she runs her nails gently along his length and he groans hungrily.

They separate for a moment to divest themselves fully of half-removed clothes and then he shifts — her motions mirror his almost instinctually — until she’s lying beneath him and he’s meeting her again in a breathless kiss. He’s got one leg between hers, can feel her heat as she arches up against him. He leaves their kiss to nip at that spot behind her ear, trailing his lips down her neck, and shifting down to attend to her breasts with his lips, his tongue, and his teeth. He shifts a hand down, dragging a finger through her slick folds before settling his ministrations on her clit. He slides two fingers smoothly into her, circling her clit with the pad of his thumb at the same time, and she whimpers.

He moves like that for a few moments before he hears her, “Jack, Jack.” At the second, more insistent, he looks up and she’s moved to take his hand that was between his legs, intertwining their fingers and using her grip as leverage to push him onto his back. Then she’s straddling him, reaching for him, and sinking down onto him. Leaning down to swallow their groans in a kiss and then resting her forehead against his, staying still for a moment.

When she sits up to move again, he’s got one hand on her hip, fingers pressing firmly as he meets her rhythm, and the other on her ribs, steadying, feeling her breathing, making teasing swipes across her breast with his thumb. After a bit, she leans down to kiss again and a strand of her newly-long hair gets caught between their mouths.

“Well this is a new challenge,” he smiles, and she can tell by the way he toys with the strand of hair between his fingers that he doesn’t mind at all.

She tucks the strand behind her ear and pushes her hair over her shoulder to hopefully keep it out of the way. “Adapt and overcome”, she answers simply, meeting his smile with a mischievous one of her own, and before he fully process that, her tongue is in his mouth and she’s rolling her hips against his, faster and more purposefully than before.

After a moment, she leans back to shift her angle, humming contentedly as he pulls more tightly against her hips with both hands. Outside the heavy rain lingers, rumbling thunder mingling occasionally with the sounds they are making. She’s got one hand on the headboard, steadying herself as their movements become less precise. The other resting on his jaw, her thumb brushing across his cheek as she watches his expression. He turns his head slightly, kissing and nibbling at her palm, her fingertips, and her eyes slide closed contentedly.

The hair that was tucked behind her ears has come loose again, and falls in a curtain around their faces as she leans over him, meeting him for a sloppy kiss. Lightning illuminates the room and for an instant her hair takes on an otherworldly glow. But then they are left again in the dim light of this generic space, she just as human as he. And he feels her pulling him over the edge, reaches between them to bring her with him, until finally they are lying loosely entangled in the darkness.

The storm presses on, a low thrum just beyond their world, as he follows her into a deep sleep.

_______________________________

Two days later he’s free from the bureaucracy and she’s free of most of the jetlag, and after breakfast they’re walking on a hillside path through the woods that surround this little town where they’ve escaped after he’s done in Geneva.

The September air is a bit too brisk for just the leather jacket she has on, but neither of them really mind the chill now that desk jobs have made time outdoors feel like a luxury. The last quarter of her coffee is cold now, but the paper cup gives her something to fiddle with as she talks.

She talks about Atlantis. About a whole litany of strange things that happened while she was there; not the kind of strange things that ended up in reports because they cause serious problems, but the quotidian strangeness that is life in another galaxy, in someone else’s city, surrounded by a bunch of incredibly eager scientists who love to touch things.

She talks about her people, and beyond thinking she deserves some sort of medal for not hitting McKay, he’s proud. Proud, but also feeling the anger on her behalf that he had tried to wall off before beginning to resurface — anger and sadness that she’s now faced with this perversely unnecessary loss.

She talks about Atlantis, and Pegasus, and a galaxy full of people so like those they have known before, struggling against immeasurable odds and monstrous threats, and a life of ever-present fear that gnaws at the soul. She talks about the glimmer of hope, of Atlantis as a small light in a vast blackness, which could yet be extinguished by politics a galaxy away.

“You did good, Sam.” It’s true, and it’s the only thing that’s true about the situation that he can bear to say right now.

“Yeah, I think so.” He hears that she mostly believes it.

They reach a curve in the path with a particularly beautiful view, overlooking a valley and beyond that some taller hills and mountains, a distant wind making the changing leaves appear to move in multi-colored waves. She pauses, leaning against the fence to take in the view, and he settles beside her in a comfortable silence.

After a few moments, he sees her looking down, thinking, and he waits for what she’s hesitating to say.

Then, “But what if it was all for nothing? Everything we lost to the Goa’uld and the Ori. What if the Wraith show up tomorrow and it’s even worse?”

“Okay,” he offers, “but couldn’t it also happen that one of those mega asteroids shows up tomorrow and wipes out Earth?”

“Well an asteroid isn’t necessarily an unsolvable problem, you know.”

“Fair point.”

“And, much though I hate to drawn on a cliche, least of all in a time like this, I think this might be what all these ‘no regrets’ people are getting at.” He says the “no regrets” part with dismissive air quotes, but ends up regarding her with an expression that’s earnest, in his own way.

“And you wouldn’t have any regrets?

“I’d regret that I wasn’t there to give Daniel more crap when Vala first showed up at the SGC.”

She looks back up at him, and he’s suddenly reminded of how, years ago when she would meet his eye in a moment like this, there would so often be a slight reserve to her expression, but now her answering look is all challenge and pride.

“I did a fair bit of that myself,” she says.

“I’m sure you did me proud.”

She ducks her head in a smile, and the sight feels like coming home for him. After a moment, the smile turns to a laugh. She looks up, and he meets her gaze inquisitively.

“I just realized Woolsey is stuck with McKay. And Ronon.”

“I’m sure Sheppard can be a piece of work, too, when he wants to be.”

“Oh yeah.” She pauses for a second, remembering Sheppard’s words to her on the _Daedalus_. She bites the inside of her cheek, takes a deep breath, and presses on against the rising tide of something too brittle and too recent to be called nostalgia.

“Woolsey’s screwed,” she chuckles. She turns to regard the panoramic view again, the matter apparently settled. After a minute, Jack recognizes the shift in her features as they slide into thoughtfulness and then determination, and tracks her gaze out to where a road seems to tracing precipitously along the edges of a ridge, disappearing into a mountain range tinted orange-red by dying foliage.

“I wonder if we could rent some bikes.”

She’s already glancing toward the path leading up a small slope and back into the center of town, and then turns to regard him with a the beginnings of that glittering smile of hers. 

In response, he pushes off from the fence, saying simply, “Lead the way.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title and inspiration from The Fray's "Rainy Zurich"


End file.
